Weekend 573.0

Artists specialize in designs. God is the greatest artist of all. This is evident in nature, but also in the designs that He has for His creatures. He has a unique plan for each one of us. Given the number of creatures, God’s designs are innumerable¹.

What an odd movie. I think I liked it. My university mentor was one of the original Detroit Mad Men, but my favorite English professor gave me a copy Adbusters and had us watch Brazil and read Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance and The Little Prince. The Limestone Library™ has a copy of The Heart of Our Cities by Victor Gruen and Ogilvy on Advertising.

(1) The Coca-Cola Kid and the Corporate Comforts of Selling Out (Back Row)

(1a) The Australian Sound:

(2) The Allure of Ruins by James Lileks (Discourse)

(2a) Quotes from On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings by Daniel Worden:

Decaying and dilapidated architecture resonates as loss, as evidence of the irreversible passage of time, yet architectural ruins emanate past grandeur. Ware’s comics, then, focus on ruins and the melancholy they elicit in an attempt to render the irreversible passage of time into an aesthetic object. In both “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings, melancholy is remade into the imagination of the ruin as whole through an engagement with the built environment.

Architecture is a vehicle to convey both the affective possibilities of experiencing the past as a whole and the perpetual frustration of the inability to reconstruct modernity’s ruins seamlessly.

¹Daily Meditations on the Psalms

Weekend 568.0 (Sparsa Collegit)

There’s a battle ahead, many battles are lost…but you’ll never see the end of the road…while you’re traveling with me.

(1) Impressions of a Soulless New Airport (The Imaginative Conservative)

“There is little architectural daring or upward movement. It is a place without a sense of place—it could be anywhere or nowhere.”

(2) Folding bike-maker Brompton rides towards £20m stake sale (Sky News)

(3) Scan from Helvetica and the New York City Subway System by Paul Shaw

Architectural Drawing. 86th St-Lexington Av Station Modernization of Control Areas

(4) A Quick & Dirty Guide to the Middle Ages (The Imaginative Conservative)

It was the Christiana Res Publica. “I saw monarchy without tyranny, aristocracy without factions, democracy without tumult, wealth without luxury,” Erasmus later wrote, idealizing the past. “Would that it had been your lot, divine Plato, to come upon such a republic.” Perhaps most important, medieval man believed that he knew his place in the Economy of Grace, in God’s universe.

(4a) Women’s rights…medieval style… (The History Jar)

Notes
The Brothers York by Thomas Penn (Pages 491-92)

Weekend 566.0 (Black Umbrella)

(1) Kingdom Hearts 20th Anniversary Vinyl LP Box — Translated Yoko Shimomura Interview (KH13 · for Kingdom Hearts)

(2) Why Did It Take 13 Years To Build The Elizabeth Line? | The Trouble With Crossrail | Spark (YouTube)

(2a) London’s railway of the future is finally here (Engadget)

(2b) Elizabeth line: London’s brand new railway has finally arrived (YouTube)

(3) Notre-Dame Cathedral Will Reopen by 2024 (Smithsonian Magazine)

(4) Bermuda “Hogge Money” Coin Sold For $96,000 (Bernews)

(4a) A quote from Bermuda’s Story by Terry Tucker:

“It was at that stage, millions of years ago, when the great winds blew our little limestone hills into the shapes they are to-day: the highest is only about 260 feet above the present sea-level. The so-called coral of which the islands are formed is in reality a true aeolian (windblown) limestone, formed of wind-driven shells and sand, with a small admixture of coral materials.”

(4b) The Earl of Southampton – Shakespeare’s Patron (No Sweat Shakespeare)

(4c) A poem by Nathaniel Tucker

Beneath my bending eye, serenely neat,
Appears my ever-blest paternal seat.
Far in the front the level lawn extends,
The zephyrs play, the nodding cypress bends;
A little hillock stands on either side,
O’er spread with evergreens, the garden’s pride.
Promiscuous here appears the blushing rose,
The guava flourishes, the myrtle grows.
Upon the surface earth-born woodbines creep,
O’er the green beds the painted ‘sturtians peep.
Their arms aloft triumphant lilacs bear,
The jessamines perfume the ambient air.
The whole is from an eminence display’d
Where the brown olive lends his pensive shade.

Hotels in England

A quick list of my top five. Here’s a link to a previous post with the different cities visited during my two-years in the UK.

(1) The Midland in Morecambe – Art deco hotel with a link to the railway (and the golden age of rail). The restaurant is top notch. It makes me pine for a revitalization of domestic travel.

Limestone Archives: Midland Hotel Flickr Album

(2) The Telegraph Hotel in Coventry – Themed hotel in a space once occupied by the local rag. In terms of theming, it’s only rival is the TWA Hotel. They have done a brilliant job preserving the interior features as well and objects that once served the newspaper are marked with QR codes (clever).

Limestone Archives: Telegraph Hotel Flickr Album

(3) Moxy Southampton – The place to either celebrate or commiserate a Saints win/loss. Southampton is my second home (and maybe where I’ll retire).

(4) Cambridge Central Station – Incredible views of the station, platforms, and railyards. The lobby displays all the rail departures / arrivals so there’s always the frenetic energy of travelers going to and from.

(5) Hilton Garden Inn Stoke on Trent – Modern and well-lit and close to the canals.

Other notable hotels include The Yarrow Hotel, Hampton by Hilton York, and the DoubleTree by Hilton Bath.

Related
British Rail Corporate Identity from 1965–1994

Weekend 506.0

(1) Two from T.S. Eliot:

“Longer and darker the day, shorter and colder the night. Still and stifling the air: but a wind is stored up in the East. The starved crow sits in the field, attentive; and in the wood the owl rehearses the hollow note of death.”

“What day is the day that we know that we hope for or fear for? Every day is the day we should fear from or hope from. One moment weighs like another. Only in retrospection, selection. We say, that was the day. The critical moment that is always now, and here. Even now, in sordid particulars the eternal design may appear.”

(2) My Flickr album of the Midland Hotel in Morecambe. It was built in the 30s and reminds me of the Bird Terminal / TWA Hotel at JFK. I’m still working on a post about the architect and artists involved in its construction.

(2a) These are beautiful photos of the hotel from Flickr member robmcrorie.

(2b) A quote from The Midland Hotel: Morecambe’s White Hope by Barry Guise and Pam Brook:

“As well as allowing him [Oliver Hill] to design a substantial building in the new style he had embraced with enthusiasm, the Midland Hotel gave Hill the opportunity to put into practice his vision of unity in architecture and decoration. It was his belief that a building’s external appearance should be intimately linked to its internal décor, furniture, and upholstery – a philosophy he likened to ‘the French ensemblier system of architect, sculptor, decorative painter and other craftsmen…collaborating to one end and ideal’. It was this holistic concept that Hill brought to the Midland Hotel, one that would see him take complete control of all aspects of the project, from the building’s exterior design to its colour scheme, works of art, decoration, and furnishings – even down to the waitresses’ outfits, the colour of the hand towels and the shape of the door handles!”

(2c) A quote on Oliver Hill by Ken Powell:

“Alongside the revolutionary dynamics of the Thirties, an older tradition of craftsmanship persisted. Oliver Hill was, almost uniquely, able to bridge the divide between modernism and tradition. His work, hedonistic and even self-indulgent, may lack the purity and progressive zeal – and the breadth of imagination – of a Lubetkin or a Mendelssohn, yet Hill was a key populariser of modern architecture, selling it to clients who were not interested in social revolution.”

(3) Desktop Departure Boards (YouTube)

(4) Digital Signage Services (UK Rail)

(5) National Rail Advertisement: Let’s get back on track (You Tube)

*When It Was Dark is a scan of a 1926 lithograph of St. Anne & St. Agnes by Donald Maxwell.

Modernity in miniature

(1) I’ve clipped the blog post title from a chapter in the excellently written British Rail Architecture 1948-97 by David Lawrence.

“For centuries architects have used miniature versions of their designs to communicate their ideas to emperors, oligarchs, magnates, civil servants and audiences who must be engaged to ensure a project is approved for development. They may be the device which convinces a client to provide substantial investment for a project.”

“Many modelers will choose a station as one of their first buildings because it is a simulacrum of the interface between trains and human activity. It is an archetype for all stations. In this way the model — in fact an assembly of sundry materials and adhesives — is an imaginative threshold into the tiny world of the model railway, inviting the modeler and audience to step, like Alice in Wonderland, into a perfect version of an imperfect world.”

>>> Source File

(2) Continental’s BIG CITY H-O Scale Modern Architecture Series (Flickr)

I have the ‘Entrance Building’ (Model No. 104) which inspired this photo at Walt Disney World. What do you think happened to Continental Models at 1 Dupont Street in Plainview, NY?

(3) Artist rendering of the new concourse for Liverpool Street (1987) from British Rail Architecture 1948-97 by David Lawrence. I love the vintage engine. It reminds me of Playmobil 4052.

Penn Station

(1) This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful (Politico)

“Penn Station is the second most heavily trafficked transit hub in the world, trailing only Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. The station serves more daily passengers than the region’s three huge airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark) combined. More people pass through Penn each weekday than live in the city of Baltimore. Anyone who has passed through Penn Station over the past half-century—or who passed through it this Thanksgiving weekend—knows that the nation’s busiest transit center is a national embarrassment, a hole in the ground where the food is ratty and the waiting rooms are sparse.”

Weekend 453.0

Dino Diner“To attempt to gain happiness, except in this way, is a labor lost; it is building on the sand; the foundation will soon give way, though the house looks fair for a time.” — Gain after Pain

“Decaying and dilapidated architecture resonates as loss, as evidence of the irreversible passage of time, yet architectural ruins emanate past grandeur. Ware’s comics, then, focus on ruins and the melancholy they elicit in an attempt to render the irreversible passage of time into an aesthetic object.” — On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings by Daniel Worden

(1) Bricks & Dinos

São Paulo

Graffiti in San Paola I was in São Paulo last week for work. It was a quick trip, with a packed agenda, so the opportunity for exploration was limited. I have a top ten list though…

(1) Cargo Bikes (Copenhagenize Design Company)

(2) Eisenbahn Pale Ale (BeerAdvocate)

(3) Estação da Luz

“Ever since this station was completed in 1901, it has remained among the most important buildings in São Paulo and Brazil’s history. For decades its clocktower ruled over the city’s skyline to give its residents a reference point to set their clocks, and today the station houses the Museum of the Portuguese Language, a huge repository of and tribute to Portuguese art, language, and literature from around the world.” (THRILLIST)

(4) Street art/graffiti/building art (THRILLIST)

(5) The Estaiada Governador Orestes Quercia is a beautiful bridge near the Anhembi Convention Center

(6) Museu de Arte de São Paulo on (7) the Av. Paulista

(8) Minhocão / Via Elevada Presidente João Goulart (Architectural Digest)

(9) Municipal Theatre of São Paulo

(10) Whether on the Av. Paulista or the Sao Paulo International Book Fair Mickey Mouse was ubiquitous.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Belmont Arena Rendering(1) Belmont Arena Renderings (NHL)

(1a) Statement from NYRA President & CEO Chris Kay regarding Belmont Park and the New York Islanders (NYRA)

(2) Belmont Park from the Limestone Photo Archives (Flickr)

(2a) My reaction after the press conference (YouTube)

(3) TWA Hotel

(4) Queens Museum (Adopt A Building)

See what I did there with the 1 and 1a (Come on horse racing fans!)?